At least 78 GOP candidates would force women to bear rapists’ babies

A partial list of Republican candidates running for US Congress in this year’s mid-term elections shows that at least 78 of them have professed to oppose abortion in all cases, including where rape or incest are involved.

The Republican National Coalition For Life, a political action committee formed by anti-feminist activist Phyllis Schlafly, sends out questionnaires every election season to Republican candidates asking them to lay out their positions on abortion.

A list of responses from this year’s candidates indicate that 78 Senate and House candidates answered that they are “pro-life without discrimination,” meaning they don’t agree with any exceptions to a ban on abortion.

The list was flagged earlier this week by Charles Johnson at the Little Green Footballs blog. Johnson counted 112 candidates who hold that view of abortion, but a Raw Story count of the listed candidates found 78 who have won their primary and indicated they would make no exceptions to allow abortion.

As the list doesn’t include all US states or all candidates running for the House or Senate, the total number of candidates backing a full abortion ban is likely higher. The list also does not cover gubernatorial candidates or politicians running for state or local government.

Among the more notable candidates backing a full abortion ban are Christine O’Donnell, running for the Senate in Delaware; Rand Paul, running for the Senate seat from Kentucky; Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann; and Missouri Senate candidate Roy Blunt.

But the list does not include a number of candidates known to hold that view, including Sharron Angle, who is running for Sen. Harry Reid’s seat from Nevada, and Joe Miller, running for Senate from Alaska.

The influence of the tea party movement on this year’s elections may have something to do with an apparent increase in the number of Republicans taking a hard-line stance on abortion, reported Amanda Terkel at the Huffington Post.

Dianne Edmondson, executive director of RNC for Life PAC, told Terkel that “we have many more candidates responding to us this year than we did in the last election cycle — probably about three times as many — and I’d say at least half of them do meet that criteria.”

“The Republican Party is, without actually talking about it, this year nominating a group of candidates for top-of-the-ticket races that are more extreme on the issue of abortion than any other slate of top-of-the-ticket candidates in any other year,” MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow reported in August.

Maddow criticized the “small-government conservatives” who supported a full abortion ban, suggesting they’re hypocritical for believing “government should be big enough that it can monitor every pregnancy in the country to ensure that every single woman who becomes pregnant is forced by the government to carry that pregnancy to term.”